


Doctor Who Drabbles and Ficlets

by Culumacilinte



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Hornblower (TV), Life on Mars (UK), Torchwood
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Ficlets, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-18
Updated: 2010-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-15 14:45:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/pseuds/Culumacilinte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of drabbles and ficlets written for various prompts-- mostly Doctor Who, with a fair few bizarre crossovers thrown in there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. UNIT: Changes

UNIT has changed a lot since she started working here. Almost as much as Jo herself has, in fact, but she can't help thinking a little wryly (she's far too polite to ever say it out loud) that their options must be stretched rather thinner than they were in the seventies if this is their new scientific advisor. And even thinner than that if they'd called _her_ in to help show him the ropes.

Malcolm Taylor is the kind of man who builds time machines in his parents' cellar. He's very excitable, very Welsh, and far more thrilled to see Jo than she supposes he has any reason to be.

'Do you mean to say,' he's got on goggles that make his eyes look like frog eyes, and he's surrounded by a tangle of wires and gadgetry, on top of which lies a familiar, official-looking file, a picture of herself at twenty years old sticking out the side. 'Do you mean to say, you're _the_ Josephine Grant?'

Malcolm shoves his goggles up his forehead, and Jo kindly stifles a laugh. 'Unless there's another one I haven't heard of. A pleasure to meet you.'

She offers a hand, but he's too dumbstruck to take it, gaping delightedly down at her. ' _The_ Jo Grant who worked with the Doctor in the 70's? Defeated the Master, Autons, Axons, Eocenes, the Keller mind parasite-'

He seems quite prepared to rattle off an alphabetical list of every alien she encountered during her first time here, and this time, Jo does laugh, shaking her head with a little smile. She finds that she's blushing, ever so slightly. 'Yes, that's me.'

'I could _kiss_ you!'

And he does.


	2. My Cue, Gentlemen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hornblower and the Eighth Doctor, because there can never be too many mistaken-identity shenanigans.

'I knew you had sisters, Mr. Bush, but I was not aware that you were in possession of a twin brother.'

Sitting behind the desk in his cabin, Horatio Hornblower eyed the two men standing before him as if they were hands dragged up for fighting, or errant midshipmen. Lieutenant Bush coughed, suspicious eyes sliding from the man across from him back to Hornblower.

'That is because I am not, sir.'

'Oh no? The evidence against that is... quite striking.'

The other man coughed as well. Despite the unnerving resemblance, his face was as animated and expressive as Bush's was impassive; he looked like a little boy having to endure the presence of adults when there were games to be played outside. 'Captain- ah, Hornblower, was it? Look, I'm awfully sorry about the confusion; just a case of purely random intrauniversal genetic mirroring, I'm sure; the universe is a big place, these things are bound to happen now and again- _but_ I actually am here for a reason, and I would very much appreciate if you could let me back up on deck. I promise you, I'm here to help.'

Bush's gaze had slid back to him despite himself, lips pressed together and one eyebrow arched high. Hornblower looked quite boggled at the sheer speed and verbosity of the man's speech, but after a moment he collected himself with a _harrumph_ , every inch the stern captain again.

'Mr-'

'Doctor,' the man supplied cheerfully.

' _Doctor_ , then. You appear out of nowhere, presume to masquerade as my first lieutenant-'

But his words were cut off as _Hotspur_ suddenly rocked violently, a sudden, sharp, wallowing roll that had no place in the calm sea they'd had for the last three nights, and Hornblower stumbled. Bush's strong sea-legs held him still, and he caught the Doctor as he fell against him. The coat he wore was soft velvet under his fingers. For a moment, he was confronted with the bizarre sight of his own face inches away from his, blue eyes bright with energy. And then the Doctor grinned.

'That's my cue. On deck, gentlemen!'


	3. Waste Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Fifth Doctor and Iris Wildthyme. In a dungeon. My later fic 'Notch in the Bedpost' is written as a sequel to this.

'Ah- Iris?'

'Doctor?'

'Ah.' The faint clank of chains against stone. 'I don't mean to seem pressuring, but seeing as you _have_ managed to extricate yourself from those manacles- and a smashing job you did of it, I must say- wouldn't the cricket thing to do be to help free me as well?'

The clinking sounded again, this time a little louder, as the Doctor wiggled his hands in their manacles for emphasis.

Iris chewed ostentatiously on her lower lip, eyeing him up and down. The chains she herself had been trussed up in now lay coiled in the corner. The Doctor swallowed. He always felt rather unnervingly like a particularly delicious steak under Iris's eye; strung up like this, the sensation was more akin to being the cow before it had the pleasure of being carved up.

... That was rather morbid of him. And Iris seemed to have got closer. He cleared his throat again.

'Iris?'

'Doctor?'

'Manacles?'

She laughed throatily, and the Doctor twitched as a delicate hand with long, manicured nails spread across the knit of his jumper, and began an extremely unsubtle move downwards.

'Come now, chuck, and waste an opportunity like this? I never.'


	4. Mutual Misunderstanding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ianto mistakes a certain copper stuck in 1973 for the Master.

'Sorry,' says Ianto for the umpteenth time, offering a fresh handkerchief.

Sam's gritted 'S fine,' is muffled by his broken nose, and Ianto suppresses a wince.

A mutual misunderstanding- or rather, a misunderstanding on Ianto's part; Sam, as it turned out, had been completely right for once. Sam had seen him, standing there in his suit with its crisp lines, his short hair and complete lack of sideburns, had seen him pull out his mobile and frown at it. Clearly not from 1973- and it was the most natural thing in the world to approach him and tell him so.

' _You_ ,' Ianto had growled after a moment of shocked silence, and then punched him in the face.

Now, one broken nose, an angry accusation of assaulting a police officer, and some immensely awkward explanations later, they're both sitting at the table in Lost and Found. Sam can't quite decide whether he wants to call the man insane or kiss him for believing him.

As for Ianto- he's busy remembering how attractive he'd found Harold Saxon before he turned out to be a madman.


	5. A Bloody Battleground of Voices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you absorb other people's personalities, hanging around a madman isn't the greatest idea.

The Master hadn't expected much, honestly. One mind is much the same as another, when it comes to the lesser lifeforms- you get what you pay for, and when the price of admission is so low, it's not a surprise when there isn't much to find.

 _This_ one, though, this C'rizz from the Doctor's divergent universe- his mind is nearly as loud as the Master's.

C'rizz's mind is full of ghosts, a bloody battleground of voices, and the Master sifts through memory after memory, his delight increasing by the minute. It's not until he brushes over a specific moment- the memory of a woman, a _lover_ ('Kill me, C'rizz, my love; _kill_ me!')- that a strong, cool hand snaps up to the Master's wrist, gripping with enough force to snap the bones.

Graciously, the Master retreats back into his own mind, finding C'rizz flushed a deep blue, his eyes hard. 'Do _not_ go there; leave her alone.'

The Master watches him for a moment, lip curled ever so slightly. 'You are quite mad, aren't you?'

And it's an echo of his own laugh that comes back at him, a barking, unhinged sound as C'rizz's fingers tighten further around his wrist. 'Oh yes.'


	6. On Those Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Most days, the Doctor doesn't know what to think of Lucy Saxon.

Most days, the Doctor doesn't know what to think of Lucy Saxon. She's a pretty, porcelain blonde with vacant blue eyes who laughs a delighted, girlish laugh when the Master gives her a razored whip and tells her that he's captured a would-be revolutionary and could she be a darling and extract some information from him? He thinks her mad, for the way she betrayed her own species, and he pities her, but that's never quite it.

Most days, he does nothing but watch, silent, and as he watches, he catalogues the looks the Master directs at his wife, and the ones she returns him. The way they touch each other, purposeful displays or casual; lustful, affectionate, distant, frightened. The Doctor knows them all, and he doesn't begrudge Lucy what she has. It's come with its cost.

Some days, spitefully, Lucy comes and whispers to him at night, all of Harry's great plans, her role in them, how much he loves her- but the Doctor is unmoved. He has other things to concentrate on than the warped emotions of the Master's human consort.

But there are days when the drums are bad, when the Master rants and raves and drowns himself in blood to silence them. And on those days, sometimes, he goes to Lucy, or she to him, and she holds him, lets him into her mind, and her eyes aren't quite so vacant. And the Doctor can see that she _understands_ him, in all the depths of his madness; she _helps_ him.

On those days, the Doctor hates her.


	7. Regeneration: Gripes (or: Why It is All the Master's Fault)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As with any regeneration, there are kinks to work out and things to get used to. Five is displeased.

The Doctor was not entirely pleased with this body.

It was new, still, of course, so he had plenty of time to grow into it, as it were, but there really was something vaguely discomfiting about the way people kept giving him _looks_. He'd tried his hardest to make himself look genteel and respectable, the sort of man one didn't question- in his last regeneration, he'd had that in spades, even if people did think him quite insane on top of it (the benefit of hindsight allowed him that particular self-perceptive clarity).

Now he just looked... pretty.

As he smoothed his hair out of the way in the mirror, adjusting his cricketer's uniform, he realised with some horror that his reflection was _pouting_ at him. Rassilon, he would never get anywhere at this rate.

Possibly the worst thing about it (though it really wasn't _that_ bad, he came to conclude eventually), was the behaviour it seemed to encourage in the Master. Of course, when it came to the Master, he'd always had a way of leering and slipping in surreptitiously inappropriate touches at the worst moment, but the leering had rarely seemed quite so filthy before. And he had a way of invading one's personal space that was really, really quite off-putting.  It couldn't be put down simply to the new, stolen body either; Tremas, he was quite sure, had never undressed someone with his eyes from a distance of inches.

Actually, he decided, the worst thing wasn't the Master's behaviour, it was his own damned reaction to it. As if this body was some kind of teenage virgin desperate to lose that title; he went over all... quivery when the Master did the Leering and Space-Invading thing, which really was _terribly_ inconvenient. Didn't lend itself at all to that authoritative posture he kept trying to find.

Of course, it didn't help that, frustrations aside, it felt rather enjoyable, the aforementioned quivery-ness, and that, he could hardly blame on the Master.

No, the Doctor was not entirely pleased with this body at all.


	8. Nomenclature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chip ponders the mysteries of his Mistress's brain.

While the Mistress sleeps, Chip examines her brain in its jar. It's a beautiful thing, breathtaking, and he gazes at it with eyes wide and lips half-parted. Sitting cross-legged on the cold floor with a stolen blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he can press fingertips to the glass of its jar. He traces patterns on the glass, follows the whorls, the wrinkles and creases and furrows in the surface of the organ.

The Mistress tried to explain it to him, once, on one of their quiet days, waiting for things to events to fall into place. _Convolutions_ was the word she used for those furrows, _sulci_ and _gyri_. He can't remember now the precise words she'd used, but those convolutions, she'd said, that's why the Mistress is so clever. Thoughts run along them, little sparks of electricity, neurons and synapses jumping on cue, all the quicker for their presence, and keep the Mistress vibrant and beautiful and sharp.

Chip hadn't understood, then, when she'd explained it to him, and the Mistress had laughed, crisp and amused, at that.

'Of course you don't, darling, you haven't got them. Well,' pretty red lips had pursed as she corrected herself absently, 'Not all of them, anyway; I didn't grow you to be a rocket scientist, and brain tissue is valuable, after all.'

'Oh,' Chip had said, only partially understanding, and the Mistress had given him a little smile and a lift of where one eyebrow ought to be.

'Don't worry your head about it, Chip; it's not built for it.'

He thinks about it sometimes, times like now, looking at the Mistress's brain. It's only right that she should have more than him; she's beautiful and clever, magnificent. She's bested the years that ought to have cut her down long ago. So it's right, surely, that she's better than Chip. He is lucky to have her. He'd be nothing without her, just a snatch of skin somewhere on a petri dish (he can't really conceive of that either, but the Mistress has told him it's true, and he trusts that it is).

Sometimes, though, he wonders if he ought to miss those _sulci_ and _gyri_ in his brain. Should he want to have as many as the Mistress has? If it meant he'd be as clever as she, perhaps he ought.

But he never seems quite able to decide.


End file.
